Landscaping Made Easy, Part 8: Houston Garden Center right now

There are two good deals that I recommend right now at the Houston Garden Center outlet which is located sort of catercorner across IH-45 from Centerpointe.  I scoped it out yesterday so that I could report my best recommendations from what stock they have remaining at this point. 

(1) Upright holly trees:  I don't know which cultivar these are, but they appear to be one of the good ones (possibly Savannah hollies quite like the ones I blogged about a few days ago).  Nothing in this life is ever perfect, and by far my biggest gripe about Houston Garden Center is that so many of their plants are irritatingly unlabeled, either because their wholesalers never bothered to label them in the first place, or because the labels were cheap and fell off before they made it to this retail center.  Ugh, that drives me nuts - every time I go there, I see people struggling to figure out what to buy.  When I was there late yesterday, a man and his wife asked me for help.  I told them what little I knew about the trees they were examining, and the guy said "This place should hire someone like you to work here."  I replied, "They could easily sell twice as much product if they would just give shoppers a tiny bit of help!"

Anyway, enough bellyaching... back to the hollies.  Look at the size of these things:

With the 70% off sale, these things are $90 plus tax apiece.  I dare you to find a better deal than that. 

Look at them compared to the size of that massive SUV.  They are located just to the left of the store entrance and that little kiosk that the worker stands in to check receipts as people are exiting the cashier area. 

Here's a close-up of the leaves and berries:

These berries have not yet turned red.  But look at the little points on the leaves... this suggests to me that they are a holly cultivar. 

I posted that close-up picture so that you could call it up on your phone and show it to someone who knew about plants, if you want to do that.  In other words, you could get second opinion on what these are.  And also so that, if you go to buy any of these, you can refer to that pic to distinguish the unlabeled hollies from the unlabeled Wisterias (avoid!) and the unlabeled Magnolias (avoid!) that are sitting in the same line-up with the hollies.

If my back yard were not already landscaped, several of these babies would be coming home with me right away.  Ninety bucks apiece for trees of that size and desirable species?  Can't beat it. 

In this previous post, I talked about the U-Haul rental place that is also quite close to us, for those who might need a trailer to get something like this home.  A pick-up truck would also do, supposing you had the muscle to get them up into the bed.  Those are approximately thirty-gallon pots they're in - they weigh several hundred pounds apiece. 

As for getting them in the ground, a big hole is all that would be required.  And maybe a few neighbors to help with the job, barn-raising-style. 

(2)  Oldhamii bamboo.  Remember, in this previous post, I warned that you should not buy bamboo unless you know exactly what you are doing, because you might accidentally end up with an invasive type that you'll later have to pay to remove from your neighbors' yards after it gets out of control. 

However, some species of bamboo will form restricted clumps, rather than sprouting up all over the place.  Myself, I'm currently growing a species called Malingensis, but I'm not sure yet whether I'm happy with its potential in the type of soil we have here in Centerpointe.  Oldhamii is one that I'm pretty sure will be successful in terms of realizing good health and height potential.  In fact, Oldhamii is already growing well in a few miscellaneous Centerpointe yards, including a yard right next to the one with the magnificent Savannah hollies. 

Here is what is currently in Houston Garden Center, just to the left of the hollies:

The first cold front of the season (YAY!!) was coming through at the time of these pics, and knocked a few of them over. 

Here's a close-up of the rare tag:

These things are a bit more expensive than the hollies.  They were marked at $599 which means that, with the sale, they'd be $180 plus tax. 

Bamboo is one of those things that people tend to either love or hate.  I grew a 25-foot species called "Punting Pole" (B. Tuldoides) at my previous home in north Clear Lake.  It made a spectacular privacy screen - a visitor would never know that I had back neighbors at all (and all my neighbors had two-story houses).  And the sound of the wind through that stuff was simply breathtaking; I used to leave my bedroom window cracked open at night just so I could hear it. 

But, as many of us found out the hard way, Tuldoides doesn't stand up well to hard freezes.  Two years ago when we were having that onslaught of winter temps in the low 20's, everyone's Tuldoides died back pretty severely.  It'll come back from the roots when that happens, but it's still better to try to grow something more resistant, which is why I chose to start my new Centerpointe property off with Malingensis.  Malingensis is more freeze-resistant, but like I said, I don't know how it will grow here yet.

Oldhamii is also likely to be susceptible to hard frosts, which is something you might want to keep in mind as a factor to consider.  My Tuldoides grew for ten years before we had a frost heavy enough to knock it back, so bamboo is not exactly fragile this way.  But when those rare hard freezes come, damage gets done.

The other thing to keep in mind is that Oldhamii is one of the largest species of bamboo.  It can attain 65 feet of height!!!  That's not to say that it will get that tall, but if conditions are ideal, it can.  For that reason, you have to think carefully about the scale of the area you're considering as a planting location. 

Right now the long-awaited cooler weather is beckoning, and I have to get outside in my yard and work.
:-)

Chop chop

1:18 PM:  This chopper has been circling around our part of League City for some time now.  It made a close pass above Centerpointe about an hour ago.

I don't know whose it is, but it doesn't appear to belong to any news media outlets, which typically use bright-colored paint (especially red and blue) and network logos.  When I see black and white, I think of Texas DPS, but I never got close enough to see any identifying marks on this one.

Helicopters are very expensive to operate.  If one is observed to be near us persistently, especially if it appears to be peeking around, chances are good that someone is behaving badly and they're trying to track that person down.  The last time I observed this kind of thing was almost exactly one year ago, when those cigarette-stealing fiends led police on a merry chase that ended up somewhere east of Calder (or so it was reported).  I keep waiting for an email blast to tell me what is going on this time, but no blast has been forthcoming. 

So if you happen to be one of us stay-at-homes or work-at-homes and you see or hear this kind of event, check that your doors are secure, keep your cell phone handy, watch your email for a blast, and rove your eyeballs around outside of each of your house windows (all four sides) to see if there's anything weird going on in your immediate vicinity.  Call the authorities if you see anything that is genuinely suspicious. 

Not sure that any of us will ever know what today's event is all about, but there it is, FWIW.

Landscaping leap year

I heard a comment in a POA meeting last year, a comment that might explain some residents' reluctance to invest in backyard landscaping.  During that meeting, a gentleman grumbled that the trees his builder had installed several years ago in his front yard had not grown at all.  "Not one single inch," he said. 

This comment suggests that some residents might be judging their "growability" factor based largely on those godawful live oaks that each and every one of us were saddled with when we bought our houses. 

An unrealistically pessimistic impression will emerge if this is the case.  Live oaks can be beautiful, majestic trees - if you have at least 20 years to sit around waiting for something to happen with them.  They're slow growing and, not only that, they don't look that good during their early years.  They should not be used as general indicators of soil potential or anything else.  I don't know why builders continue to use them - inertia, perhaps.  Houston builders have been plopping live oak saplings in front yards for decades now.  Force of habit?  Cookie-cutter mass-production development methods. 

Houston landscaping guru Randy Lemmon is among those who use the catchy phrase "sleep, creep, leap" to describe what typically happens with newly-installed landscape plants.  "First it sleeps, then it creeps, then it leaps", meaning, you won't see much happen during the first or second growing seasons when new plants are focused on establishing their root systems, but come the third season, the plants tend to explode into new growth, leaping skyward in the process.

You can see the "leap" effect right now, live and direct, along the northeastern section of Centerpointe Drive.

View looking southwest along Centerpointe Drive, probably in 2008 (screengrab courtesy of the Googlemobile).  At this point, they were still raw-looking and staked, so they likely hadn't been in the ground long.

Centerpointe Section 9 would not commence groundbreaking until first or second quarter 2009 (streets and infrastructure) and mid-third quarter 2009 (houses).

You can see that these newly-planted trees are puny, but look at them in the photo below, which I took this morning: 

Almost the same view (my phone camera has a wider-angle lens).

If you look at the growth that the foreground trees have produced, the effect is almost comical:

Just about all of the trees on this section of Centerpointe Drive show the same effect.

Now, you may say to yourself, "2008 + 3 = 2011, so why did they leap in 2012?"

If you remember, we had the worst drought in recorded history in 2011plus an August that was literally beyond comprehension in terms of heat.  Growth trends in 2011 were not normal as a result.  Not only did most trees not grow, many of them (including those dastardly front-yard live oaks) actually died back by one or more feet (if they lived at all, which many in Section 9 did not).  This "greenbelt" corridor shown in the pic above is covered by the neighborhood sprinkler system, but nothing could have compensated for the weather extremes that we had.  2012 had more normal weather and rainfall amounts and so gave trees the window they needed to advance themselves. 

You might also say, "Well, they finally grew, but they look spindly and scruffy."

Sort of looks like the tree equivalent of a bad hair day, eh?  Yes they do look a bit weird and wild at the moment, but now that those main trunks have shot up, the canopy will infill with new sub-branch and leaf density.

Anyway, the moral of the story is, stuff will grow here, and grow well, even under the onslaught of weather extremes.  Your sluggishly-growing, mass-produced front-yard live oaks are not reliable indicators of your yard's true growing potential. 

Landscaping Made Easy, Part 7: Pyramidal holly cultivars

This post is one in a series intended to provide some landscaping ideas for Centerpointe residents who may wish to improve their back yard privacy and resulting property values, but who may not know which plants would be best suited to our upper Texas near-coastal climate and our tiny back yards.

***
REVISION:  This post was revised a day after initial publication following receipt of additional information about the cultivar in question. 

The tag line for this entry should be "Other Peoples' Plants".  This is the first time I'm diverting from my own landscaping assemblage in order to describe another Centerpointe resident's yard - one that I really think represents a wonderful job - easy, dramatic impact, zero maintenance, not overdone, and effective for privacy. 

Just look at the impact as seen from the yard behind it:

Let's first look at the yard in which I was standing when I took this pic.  I bet you winced and said "Yuck!!" upon seeing this totally non-cozy yard in the foreground here.  Someone took the time and money to put in a nice pool - but only half-did the job, leaving that pool garnished with only two exposed utility boxes and one hell of an ugly fence.  Would you really want to swim with nothing but a hulking transformer staring at you?  Doesn't that conjure up images of water-borne electrocution?  I've seen Motel 6 pools that look more inviting than this.

And yes - arguably this property in the foreground went for a low price the last time it sold (I know these buyers so I know what they paid).  With a back yard that looks like that, what could those previous sellers have realistically expected in the way of a sale here??  They took a financial hit, by their own faults.  And that then translated into a comparable sale ("comp") that reinforced lower property values for the rest of us. 

Now look at the yard behind the one in which I'm standing.  Look at those trees!!  WOW!!!!  What a contrast!!

I was so impressed with those trees that I went to this adjacent owner, knocked on their front door, and said, "Hi!! I'm your nosy neighborhood blogger!  Can you please tell me what cultivar is in your back yard??"

Unfortunately for me, the current owners were not the original owners who had put in this landscaping, and they did not know what kind of tree that is. 

It seems almost certain that at least two of the three trees visible in the photo above are holly cultivars.

It's got the characteristic leaf shape and bright red berries.

I originally thought that these were Foster's holly (Ilex x attenuata 'fosteri'). 

Smaller examples of Foster's holly
screengrabbed from this Auburn University website. 

But judging by the photographs above, Daniel at Maas Nursery in Seabrook suggests that they are Savannah holly (Ilex x attenuata 'Savannah').  So apparently I was correct on the species but not the cultivar (according to USDA, there are 39 holly species grown in America, but their system doesn't immediately account for different cultivars). 

Savannah holly pic screengrabbed from the cache of an expired domain name.  I thought this was an interesting pic because the guy is holding a measuring stick to emphasize just how tall they are.  And yet they are not very wide or heavy, which makes them great options for Centerpointe.  Furthermore if you look at that example at photo right, it looks like they will display nice straight trunks should you decide to "raise their skirts" (prune them up). 

This Forest Service Fact Sheet says that Savannah holly can get 30 to 45 feet tall, but only 6 to 10 feet wide.  That makes them very suitable for a small yard.  For comparison, the average Centerpointe two-story home is probably between 25 and 35 feet high at the roof peak.  That means that Savannah holly would be on scale with the closely-spaced houses, without growing into huge dominating things that would not look right in our restricted yard areas. 

Other internet resources note that they can add about 3 feet per year in height.  This is something that residents may want to contemplate if they are inclined to conclude, "Oh, we've only lived here for two years, so we haven't gotten around to planting anything in our yard yet."  If this tree were your choice, with two years of inactivity, you'd be forfeiting about six feet of gain on a tree that you might install at six to ten feet of height to start with.  Two years of planting inactivity therefore means the difference between "privacy" and "no privacy" in your back yard. 

Back to this Centerpointe example property.  This previous owner knew what they were doing when they developed their backyard landscaping plan:

Note that there's a long shadow being cast by the deck canopy (white object) such that the back yard looks shallower than it actually is.  These trees only consume about 20% of the available space, leaving a very open feel even while establishing a privacy screen and adding considerable dimension and interest.

Note also that this previous owner did not spend a lot of money or create a big maintenance headache for themselves here.  These trees aren't even set in mulch beds.  Furthermore, they are evergreen, so no big leaf-raking burden. 

Screengrab from Googlemaps.

As for sourcing information for Savannah holly, Maas Nursery does report that they have them in stock, as well as similar cultivars such as East Palatka holly and Nellie R. Stevens holly.  I found a listing for the latter at Lowes hardware store, but remember that if you shop sales, you can often do considerably better than regular retail prices.  I will try to find additional sourcing information for these things in the near future. 

Same Centerpointe hollies as seen from a different angle.
Note that you don't totally have to create a solid imposing "wall" of trees in order to achieve the desired "living fence" effect of dimension, vertical impact, and privacy. 

The best use of Centerpointe volunteer time

In this recent post, I asserted my viewpoint that, if anyone in Centerpointe feels the urge to devote time to enhancing the neighborhood, that time should not be squandered developing new ways to put the run on pickers. 

Of course, my opinion begs the following question:  What would be a more productive use of a volunteer's time, if they had some extra time to give to devote to subdivision issues?

Those of you who read this blog already know my answer:  Develop a neighborhood outreach initiative that encourages residents to establish some friggin' landscaping in their back yards!!

Recall this frightful scene:

View looking between two rows of houses that are several years old now.  In other words, none of these residents planted anything significant in those intervening years.

I can guarantee you that views like this will not help neighborhood property values.
You never hear a prospective buyer say, "Oooooh look, honey!  Absolutely no privacy!  How wonderful!"

And recall my subsequent comparison of the overall "feel" of this to rows of prison cells overlooking a common corridor.  The suburban analog to Alcatraz, in other words. 

Most residents of Centerpointe are not the slightest bit dumb.  They know that a barren-earth back yard will not help their resale values.  However, many of those residents:

1. Are not from this part of the country.  They moved here because of career transfers.  They simply don't know what plants would grow well here as a result of having no experience in this climate.
2. Have limited time because they're working hard to pay for their lifestyles.  They can only devote a small amount of time to their yards.
3. Have limited interest in landscaping.  Everyone without exception is interested in higher property values, but landscaping in itself is very boring for many folks.

Earlier this year, I started trying to help supply some tools that might lead to at least partial resolution of this issue by creating a database of blog posts in which I showcase a bunch of plants that: 

1. Are immediately available at retailers within two miles of Centerpointe.
2. Grow well in our climate, including having resistance to both drought and freeze episodes.
3. Are extremely cost-effective - almost shockingly low-priced. 
4. Require virtually no maintenance. 
5. Work well in the tiny back yards that most of us have.  They are scale-appropriate and don't overwhelm our restricted spaces. 

It's about time that I resumed the building of that blog database, for the following reasons:

1. Fall is a great time to plant many things.  The cooler weather allows landscaping to get its roots established for a few months before having to face the onslaught of summer heat.
2. YIPPEE!!!  The Houston Garden Center annual 70% off sale is now back on!!

If you just want a plant-it-and-leave-it backyard landscape, there is not much that you would need that is not on this list.
Screengrabbed from http://houstongardencenters.com/ad.php

The answer is no, they don't give me any kickbacks for blogging them.  I refer to them because they have great sales and because they are located about one mile from the Centerpointe front entrance.  It doesn't get any easier than this. 

Just to drive home my point about neighborhood improvement priorities, let's do the following thought experiment. 

Let's compare potential bang for the volunteer buck.

Let's say that someone puts forth a concerted effort and we eliminate pickers and then I'm proven wrong about theft causality, and petty thefts magically cease. 

Well, let's look at what the likely result of that scenario would be.  In the last six months, Centerpointe residents have collectively lost the following due to petty theft or attempted burglary (as tabulated on the Crime Reports website, exclusive of an alleged wire fraud that was not physically connected to the neighborhood):

1. One Apple Macbook from an unlocked vehicle.
2. Items of unstated monetary value from an unlocked vehicle.
3. One residential pre-hung back door (busted but not entered).

So what are we talking about here??  Perhaps three thousand dollars total collective losses?

OK - in our thought experiment, let's compare that to the estimated property value forfeiture that is occurring because a high percentage of residents have landscaping that is arguably substandard for our price-point.

Let's say that perhaps, on average, we each forfeit 1% of our property value because we either have no landscaping, and/or we're flanked by stark and less-appealing McMansions that have no landscaping and no privacy as a result.

HAR says that Centerpointe's median appraised value is $221,600 and that there are 405 homes here.

Do the math.  Assuming that very reasonable 1% loss, it works out to be a little less than one million dollars that Centerpointers are leaving on their collective property value table. 

Personally I suspect that lack of landscaping causes a much bigger hit to a property value than 1%, but you get the picture.  This is a crude conservative estimate I'm doing simply for illustrative purposes here.  Some accounts say that property values could be increased 10% to 20% by good lanscaping.  Do THAT math and then resume reading this after you've picked yourself up off the floor.

SO, the question then becomes:  If you have time to spare, do you want to devote that time to resolving the conditions that collectively might continue to cost us a few thousand bucks a year, or do you want to resolve the conditions that are effectively costing us a million bucks or more?

To me, this is a total no-brainer.  Stay tuned for additional Centerpointe-centric blog posts about how to improve your landscaping for almost no money. 

Picking postscript

It figures that the church sponsoring the "super garage sale" would publish their announcement of the upcoming sale one day after I wrote a blog post about it.  Here is a screengrab of that, given that I could not have included it yesterday due to the timing of publication:

Click on it to enlarge for better readability.

Several points worth noting:

1. They will not accept adult clothing, but refer you to ICM if you wish to donate that stuff.  I did not mention ICM in my first post, but they are a great organization.
2. Church volunteers will come to your house and take your large sellable items, if you want them to do that.  You do not have to move them yourself.   Essentially what they have done with this moving offer is make donating to them easier than you having to drag the stuff to the curb yourself for the pickers.

 Hope this helps!

More perspective on picking, Part 2

This post follows up my August 26 entry where I wondered whether pickers really are an issue with which we should be concerned.  No concise backstory has yet emerged on that issue - no definitive example of a picker ever having caused a problem here or been responsible for any actual theft.

Of course, the inverse is also true - there's no definitive evidence that pickers have never been responsible for a theft. 

But by the same logic, though, there's no definitive evidence that someone's lawn crew has never been responsible for a theft. 

In fact, if I had to suspect any entity of conducting theft surveillance, it wouldn't be the pickers, who (to my knowledge) have never been eye-witnessed anywhere but squarely in public rights-of-way, and whose individual truck license plate numbers are easily recordable for anyone who wants to take the time to do it. 

If I were going to suspect someone, it would be the myriad lawn crews, who literally have a weekly opportunity to enter peoples' back yards and peer closely into every window of every house they serve (knowing full well who is home and who is not home at the time when they do it).  It's the perfect front for surveillance.  Let's be honest about this: how many people in Centerpointe actually know the names of each of their lawn crew members?  How many people pay their lawn crews using any traceable method?  Not many - by and large, those are cash transactions, no questions asked.  And even if the crew bosses drive motor vehicles with traceable license plates, each one of those guys has two or three anonymous helpers who, in many cases, probably aren't even in the country legally. 

If I were going to stake out Centerpointe for theft purposes, that's definitely the route I would go: I'd become a lawn boy.  I'd choose the very obvious method that:

1. Would not reveal my name
2. Would not require me to drive an identifiable car to the target, and
3. Which would simultaneously give me direct physical access to all four sides of my target houses, not keep me confined to the public streets where I couldn't see very much. 

Do you see the futility of trying to solve a problem for which no evidence exists by using this kind of inference ("it might be the pickers")?  It's arguably not logical. 

It's also a potential black hole of mushrooming effort.  What would happen if we made a concerted effort to get rid of pickers?  Dollars to donuts, we'd still have routine thefts.  So then we'd get rid of lawn crews next?  And then what? 

NEVERTHELESS, it's still worth looking at the issue of recycling / repurposing in general because there are some path-of-least-resistance alternatives of which our residents may not yet be aware.  Here are a few good options if you don't wish to simply leave stuff at your curb on trash nights.

(1) Centerpointe Yard Sale.  Once a year, usually in the spring before it gets too hot, we have a neighborhood-wide yard sale which attracts a lot of traffic due to the density of sales.  More homes with stuff to get rid of makes for more local people interested in buying, so this can be very efficient.  Look to the Newsletter or POA website for information on that.

The communal yard sale has the advantage of drawing a lot of people and getting a lot of unwanted items moved out of here at once.  However, it also has the disadvantage of being of limited convenience: I myself have never been able to wait long enough for the next yard sale to roll around.  When I clean and reorganize a section of my house or yard, I need to start and finish the job within the same day because on the next day, some other responsibility will be demanding my time.  I can't half-do the job and wait three months or whatever until the next yard sale is scheduled in order to get rid of the products of that effort (unless they are small and easily stored).  I suspect this is true of many people, which is why they consistently set stuff at the curb for pickers.  For this reason, there are additional alternatives worth considering.

(2)  Goodwill.  The old tried-and-true donation standby, and they supply receipts for tax purposes.  Here is the Goodwill locator page.   You should check directly with your outlet of choice to verify that they are active; for some reason, Goodwill storefronts tend to move around a lot.

Here's a Googlemaps screengrab showing active locations as of today's date.  Look 'em up.

(3) Churches.  A few local churches have concentrated on garage sales as a revenue stream.  Then after they get done selling what can be sold, they truck the residuals to Goodwill.  So this is potentially a win-win-win alternative:

1. I believe that you can record the donation for tax purposes (you don't get a tax deduction by giving stuff to pickers, and you don't get a tax deduction by selling in the Centerpointe annual neighborhood garage sale)
2. The church gets money to fund its community outreach programs.
3. Goodwill gets the remaining items to distribute to people in need. 

The church with which I have the greatest familiarity and which has established a robust and high-quality garage sale clientele is Bay Area Unitarian Universalist Church (BAUUC) which is located under the Clear Lake water tower on El Camino Real.   They have church-wide garage sales twice per year. The next donation period is October 21-25, 2012, with the resulting public sale taking place October 26-28.  I always donate my smaller items to this one, and if anyone would like more info, please contact me via my gmail address which is centerpointe.blog. 

(4) Craigslist.  Need to get rid of larger or non-donatable items quickly, but don't find palatable the idea of pickers at your driveway in the middle of the night?  Then why not simply list your give-aways in a "Curb Alert" on Craigslist during the bold light of day?

Here's a partial screengrab of an example listing from last weekend. 
"Curb alert" means that the poster has set free items out on their curb for anyone who wants them.
This particular address is located in South Shore Harbor.

This is a very well-established practice, but I do have one recommendation if you choose it: don't list your exact house number.  This user could have instead said "one hundred block of Hidden Lake" and not lost any communication efficacy.

If you use Craigslist, you can partially screen who shows up, if you want to do that.  You have the option of getting the email and phone number of whoever will be coming your way.  You might think to yourself, "Ooooooh, if I use Craigslist, I might attract an ax murderer!"  But think of it from the other party's perspective:  you might BE an ax murderer trying to lure them with an offer of a free couch.  Most of the time, the people alerted by this method will want to make contact with you before they collect your stuff.  Mutual verification reassures both parties that there's nothing fishy going on.  If someone reveals their name, cell phone and email to you, they probably don't have ulterior motives.

I use Craigslist from time to time for large items that are not good candidates for church or Goodwill donation.  Do you remember that post I wrote about the lethality of Sago palms?  And how a Sago palm resulted in sixteen hundred dollars of veternarian bills because our dog got poisoned by chewing on it?  After that happened, I dug up and listed all of our Sagos on Craigslist, cleaned out our entire yard (we had numerous Sagos, ignorant buggers that we were).  Get this:  they were picked up by an oil company executive and are now enjoying the poshest possible lives as balcony container plants in a skyscraper penthouse in downtown Houston.  They are literally fifty stories into the sky where they can no longer poison dogs or small children.  I kid you not - that's where my Sagos ended up!!  Craigslist rules!!
:-)

Here's what I gave away this past Saturday afternoon (during the proverbial bright light of day):

A queen palm that needed a new pot, and a Dogloo. 
Note that I placed both in the hell strip so that they did not appear to be "within" my yard and thus off limits.
Also, to be absolutely clear, I put a "FREE" sign on the Dogloo so that the sight of someone taking it would not raise the alarm of any of my neighbors. 

People have smart phones with which they monitor sites like Craigslist for new listings.  The queen palm disappeared within about an hour.  The Dogloo took slightly longer. 

(5)  Clear Lake Freecycle.  I think you need a Yahoo address to post to this.  I use it, but don't meet many people that way, though, because the Craiglist people usually get to me first. 

URL here.
It's a very active group.

Anyway, there's a handful of good alternatives for you if you wish not to encourage our midnight trash pickers.